An oracle article by Parnian Taidi, Product Marketing Director for Oracle Linux and Virtualization.
A specialized supplier of cloud, application, database, and infrastructure management services, Blue Crystal Solutions (BCS) helps clients cost-effectively architect, orchestrate, migrate, and support cloud workloads. Headquartered in Adelaide Australia, BCS has been providing information technology services to clients across industries and levels of government since 2004.
I recently met with Managing Director and CEO Vito Rinaldi, and Senior Client Lead Josh Woolston of BCS to better understand the role and value of Oracle Linux in their solutions.
Results that matter
BCS provides database, infrastructure, and applications support and services, 24/7 across Australia and worldwide. They have many clients in the public sector and find that digital technologies are critical to modernizing and transforming public services. They have been implementing solutions with every Oracle Database release since 10g, as well as with Oracle Middleware and Oracle EBS, on-premises and in the cloud.
“The main result that matters to me is a happy customer. We ensure that we deliver and provide the best solution that meets their business needs and increases their business performance in a rapidly changing IT environment. Customer retention is key for us. We have customers that have been with us for 18 years,” Vito shared.
Oracle runs best on Oracle
BCS presale engineers working with customers continuously find that Oracle Linux functionality is the best fit for workloads which include Oracle Database, Data Guard, RAC clusters, middleware, and applications. As it is optimized out-of-the-box for these enterprise workloads, it provides the performance and reliability that their customers require. They find that Oracle workloads run best on Oracle Linux.
“As a service provider, we need to meet the performance, security, and reliability requirements of our customers and meet strict SLAs. With the complete synergy between Oracle Linux and Oracle Database, middleware, and applications such as E-Business Suite, we can confidently meet these requirements and SLAs,” Vito shared.
Josh added: “Having a one-stop shop for the full stack has provides us much better incident resolution times. But more importantly, it provides business benefits to customers, such as early access and ease of deployment of software fixes, functionality, and enhancements; higher security with lower risk; and optimized and reduced support costs.”
BCS customers usually want to consolidate their Oracle Databases workloads onto fewer instances to optimize performance and licensing. As such, BCS finds that Oracle virtualization is a great fit as it helps with specific customer workload requirements and enables savings through hard partitioning.
Josh shared: “Moving to the Oracle KVM-based virtualization manager has simplified our support process and installations compared to our previous non-Oracle virtualization methods.”
Comprehensive, cost-effective
To help customers optimize their business performance, BCS needs to provide cost-effective solutions that are easy to implement and maintain. They find that Oracle Linux Premier Support which includes not only 24/7 Linux support but also support for virtualization, management, automation, and clustering tools, is a comprehensive and cost-effective support offering that helps them best serve their customers.
BCS has created an integrated, proactive, and pre-emptive event and outage monitoring tool for applications and databases, called BlueDiamond. It is their flagship enterprise SaaS product to deliver managed services, and runs on Oracle Linux.
Hybrid cloud deployments
Most BCS customers are operating in hybrid cloud environments. Initially a lift and shift to the cloud was most popular, but now many organizations are keeping or bringing back some of their workloads on-premises. For customers’ critical workloads, BCS always recommends using Oracle Linux which is supported on-premises and in public clouds such as OCI, AWS, and Azure.
“We are moving towards more and more cloud implementations. Having the same operating environment across on-premises and different public clouds simplifies operations for our customers,” Vito shared.
BCS is moving traditional deployments to container based deployments. For example, they recently worked with an international client and built a new Oracle environment in AWS using containers and Kubernetes on Oracle Linux.
Future plans
On a growth trajectory, BCS is focusing on expanding their managed service client base across Australia and internationally. They are also exploring ways to add AI/ML within their cloud capability to assist clients in automating manual/repeat tasks, allowing smarter decision making while increasing business efficiency.
Vito Rinaldi, Managing Director, Blue Crystal Solutions has 30+ years of experience in IT, strategy and partnerships. Vito is dedicated to driving innovation and maximizing clients’ business performance by putting them at the center of everything BCS does. He is a Board Director for the Australian Industry Information Association (AIIA), a representative body and advocacy group for those in the digital ecosystem. His passion for supporting the community extends beyond IT and through BCS, he supports local schools and sporting teams and provides local talent opportunities through graduate and leadership programs.
Josh Woolston Senior Client Lead – New Services, Blue Crystal Solutions with 8+ years in ICT Sales. Josh operates at the intersection of business and technology. He works closely with clients to leverage BCS services and solutions to support their business strategy and goals. With a desire to holistically understand clients’ requirements, Josh uses a mix of strong business acumen, natural curiosity, network of technical partners, and creativity to find the right solution for his clients.
Parnian Taidi Product Marketing Director for Oracle Linux and Virtualization, with over 15 years of experinece in high-tech fortune 500 companies.
